Double Down: Game Change 2012 (43 page)

At a dinner with donors on Friday, the night before the caucuses, Gingrich’s mood began to brighten. Adelson rose and offered him a heartfelt tribute, talking about what a great friend to Israel he had been, how he would make “a fantastic president.”

By the next morning, Gingrich was convinced he saw a route to his third resurrection: a long march through the South and the industrial Midwest to the Texas primary that spring. There he would emerge again as the front-runner as Romney buckled under the weight of his Massachusetts record. Newt was sure that Santo would be gone by then. The guy had more children than campaign staff; he wasn’t built for the long haul. Facing off one-on-one against Mitt, Newt would deny him a majority of delegates. Then the two of them would duke it out at the Republican convention.

The scenario now sustaining Gingrich was implausible, but it struck those who knew him best as all too typical. In trying to explain his old friend’s behavior to Boston, Vin Weber often observed that Newt saw himself as the hero of an epic historical film unspooling in his mind. Gingrich was too smart not to grasp the damage that Romney and Restore had done to him in Iowa and Florida. But there would be nothing doughty about dropping out and throwing his support to Mitt. What Newt’s psyche required was a fittingly dramatic end to his story arc. A convention-floor brawl for the heart and soul of the party would surely qualify.

Gingrich provided a public preview of the blockbuster brewing in his
head late that Saturday night. The results of the caucuses were still rolling in, but it was clear he had been crushed by Romney. Rather than deliver a concession speech, Newt conducted a press conference—a twenty-two-minute montage of sarcasm, contumely, and free disassociation. He emphatically denied rumors that he was withdrawing from the race. He predicted his resurgence and its timing with demented certitude. He pledged to march all the way to Tampa. And then he applied his rhetorical mace to Mitt.

After listening to Newt mash his rival in florid terms yet again,
The New York Times
’s Jeff Zeleny asked him, “Can you be successful going forward if Mitt Romney is still in your head?” Scowling, sneering, Gingrich answered, “I’m not sure Mitt Romney is in my head . . . I’m sure that with a psychiatric degree, that will get you a tremendous opportunity to have new clients.” Then he returned to lambasting Romney, calling him “substantially dishonest,” “blatantly dishonest,” and “fundamentally dishonest.”

Even among a political class inured to over-the-top rhetoric from Gingrich, his unhingedness in Vegas caused mandibles to drop to sternums—and nowhere more so than in Boston. Thinking Gingrich was still a threat, Romney had devoted the better part of three straight days to defending his position in the Silver State. But his final victory margin was a whopping twenty-nine points.

After New Hampshire, Boston had believed the race might be over. After Nevada, certainty took hold. While Gingrich might stick around, encouraged by Adelson’s largesse and the prospect of another debate scheduled for later in the month, the Romneyites were convinced that Newt was plainly cooked and possibly crackers. (Gingrich would win just one more primary—in his home state, Georgia.) As for Santorum, he wasn’t even in Nevada. How could someone who had ceded the field ever be any sort of threat?

•   •   •

I
T WAS A MIRACLE,
in a way, that Santorum was still in the race at all. His special-needs daughter, Bella, had caught a cold while he was in South Carolina, and by the time he left the trail in Florida, her condition was spiraling downward. Rick and Karen had been dealing with Bella’s fragile health since the day she was born; they had a makeshift ICU in their home. But
after a long night in which her heart rate kept rising and her breathing became more labored, they rushed her to the hospital, where the doctors diagnosed her with pneumonia. The last time Bella had been this bad off, she was on a ventilator for five weeks and almost died. If that situation repeated itself now, Santorum’s campaign would be over.

Bella usually didn’t react quickly to treatment. This time, she did. Twenty-four hours later, her lungs were nearly clear and her doctors at a loss to explain the rapidity of her recovery. The Santorums put it down to prayer. In any case, the scare had passed—and Rick bounded back into the fray. But rather than making a beeline for Nevada, he headed to Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado, where the next set of contests would take place on February 7.

The leapfrogging strategy was a brainchild of his campaign manager, Mike Biundo. After three straight finishes near the bottom of the pack, Santorum was running out of cash. The media was writing him off. Nevada was a lost cause. (
Vegas isn’t my town,
thought Rick.) If he didn’t win something, somewhere, somehow, Santo was finished.

Biundo believed that victory was readily obtainable in Missouri, where Gingrich had failed to qualify for the primary ballot, and that the electorate in Minnesota’s caucuses would be conservative enough that Santorum could prevail in them, too. While Colorado would be a dicier proposition, pulling off a shocker there wasn’t out of the question. Though all three contests were nonbinding in terms of delegates, Biundo reckoned that if Santorum brought home two wins, the media narrative might shift to Rick’s reemergence as the anti-Mitt. If he pulled off the trifecta, all the better. It’s time to make a stand, Biundo told his boss.

Santorum sensed a new kind of energy when he returned to the hustings. In Colorado Springs, he made a surprise appearance with James Dobson, the prominent evangelical leader whose organization, Focus on the Family, was based in the state and influential with politically active conservatives. In Colorado and Missouri, he was accompanied by Foster Friess, the multimillionaire mutual fund manager who had emerged as Santo’s super-PAC sugar daddy.

But it was the outpouring of concern over Bella that most inspired Santorum. His retreat from the trail to tend to his girl received wide media
coverage, and now he was regularly being approached on rope lines by voters asking after her—especially by those with special-needs kids of their own. At one event, he noticed a father standing with his young daughter, who had Down syndrome, holding up a sign reading
I’M FOR BELLA’S DAD
. Santorum’s momentum in the February 7 states seemed to be growing every day. He wondered if he would have chosen this path if he hadn’t been pulled abruptly off the trail and compelled to take stock of his campaign.
Everything happens for a reason,
he thought.

Before Nevada, Team Romney did next to nothing to counter Santorum’s moves. Missouri was as hopeless for Mitt as Nevada was for Rick—and Beeson and Weber agreed that Minnesota was a goner as well. But the campaign was confident about the outlook in Colorado, which Romney had carried in 2008. Having spent a ton of dough in Florida, Boston wasn’t eager to pour dollars or Romney’s precious time into a contest with no delegates at stake that Mitt was likely to win in any event. Beeson was a native of Colorado, knew its politics backward and forward. Don’t worry, he kept saying. Santorum and Gingrich will split the evangelical vote, and we’ll run right up the middle.

But Newt’s tour de farce Vegas press conference, and the full-scale collapse it epitomized, had an unexpected spillover effect. On Super Bowl Sunday, February 5, Newhouse’s polling started picking up a migration of Gingrich voters to Santorum in Colorado. Suddenly Boston’s decision to have Romney camp out in Nevada was looking iffy—though Mitt remained unworried. Arriving in Colorado on Monday, he was greeted by big crowds; three thousand showed up to see him that night in Centennial.

Romney woke up the next morning to snow on the ground—the first bad sign of many he would encounter on February 7. The weather made him late to his first event. (Nothing rankled Mitt more than being off schedule.) His body man, Garrett Jackson, had picked up a stomach bug and stayed behind in Nevada—leaving Romney without his human security blanket. The Santorum-friendly polling trend from Sunday had accelerated Monday. The staff was bickering. Beeson’s confidence was ebbing.

That morning, the political director sent out a preemptive memo to the press dismissing the importance of the three races that day because they would award no delegates. “John McCain lost 19 states in 2008, and we
expect our opponents to notch a few wins too,” Beeson wrote. But “it is difficult to see what [they] can do to change the dynamics of the race.”

In Denver, Romney retreated to his hotel room to rest up for his election night speech, telling his traveling team he wanted an on-time departure. But when the hour arrived, Mitt was still in his suite. He’s watching the early returns on TV, Stevens told Charlie Pearce. He’s spooked.

“Have you seen these numbers?” Romney asked Stevens a few minutes later in the suite.

“They suck,” Stevens replied.

“We’re going to lose Colorado,” Romney said.

“Yeah, we are. It’s not going to matter in the long run, but it’s gonna be a pain in the ass.”

The numbers, in fact, were extremely close, but the closeness only infuriated Mitt. “Why didn’t I come here more?” he asked. “We could’ve won.”

Before his speech at the Tivoli Student Union, Romney stood three feet from a giant plasma screen backstage, still glued to the cable coverage. He had lost Missouri and Minnesota, as expected, but the final results weren’t in yet for Colorado. As Pearce alerted him to the two-minute warning, a CNN reporter, broadcasting live from the event, appeared on the monitor and remarked on the meagerness of the crowd on hand.

Shooting daggers at Pearce, Romney snipped, “Did you hear that?”

“Guv, we’ve got as many as we’re gonna get,” Pearce said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Back at his hotel afterwards, Romney learned from Beeson that he had in fact lost all three contests. For the first time, Beeson entertained the possibility that Mitt might not be the nominee—that GOP voters might be about to cast aside electability in favor of purity, driving the party off a cliff.

“This thing could be about to go
Thelma and Louise
on us,” he said to his war room colleagues.

Up in his suite, Romney was equally funked.
Rick will surge now—he’s far less damaged than Newt,
Mitt thought.
And I’ll be starting all over again
. Romney puzzled through the potential reasons he had been swept:
We didn’t visit or spend dollars in these states. Rick did a great deal. My “poor” statement. The Mormon Thing, Romneycare, unanswered attacks. I’m seen as the moderate, and he’s the conservative alternative.

Santorum’s speech in Saint Charles, Missouri, sought to reinforce exactly that perception. “Tonight was a victory for the voices of our party, conservatives and Tea Party people, who are out there every single day in the vineyards building the conservative movement in this country,” he said. “[On] health care, the environment, cap-and-trade, and on the Wall Street bailouts, Mitt Romney has the same positions as Barack Obama.” Positioning himself as a populist antidote to Romney, he touted his vision of “supply side economics for the working man” and added, “I care about 100 percent of America.” But he also injected a dose of God talk in the mix, taking Obama to task for “impos[ing] his secular values” on Catholics with his newly unveiled contraceptive mandate.

Like Romney, Santorum took the podium before he knew the outcome of Colorado for certain. When CNN called the state for him, he and Karen were so thrilled that they started snapping pictures of the TV screen. Santorum wrapped his arms around Biundo in a bear hug. Against the odds, they had gone all in and pulled off the trifecta. “This is going to be a game changer,” Santorum said.

•   •   •

T
HE ROMNEYITES TRIED TO
make the case to the contrary the next morning on a conference call with Mitt. They repeated their talking points about delegates, the long haul, and yadda, yadda, yadda. The candidate wasn’t buying it. You guys can talk about that stuff all you want, he said. But for normal people just seeing the news, they’re not going to say, Oh, those were just beauty contests. They’re going to say, Wow, this Santorum guy has a little bit of something in him.

Romney was right about the tenor of the coverage. Biundo’s bet that the press would treat Santo as the ultracon comeback kid had paid off. Eager to shift the storyline, Mitt held a press conference that day in Atlanta in which he inveighed against Obama on contraception and attacked Santorum from the right on spending. But Romney’s splashier opportunity for a reset would come forty-eight hours later in Washington, where he was slated to appear at the annual meeting of CPAC.

Highly anticipated addresses were always a source of angst and agita in Romneyland—because Mitt’s speechwriting operation really wasn’t an
operation at all. Romney considered himself an able pen; given his druthers, he would have handled all his wordsmithing himself. That being impractical, he had forged an authorial bond with Stevens. But Stuart had a great many other responsibilities, so their joint rhetorical endeavors were often shambolic and last-minute. In an effort to make the process less of a two-man show, Myers had brought on board a talented young writer, Lindsay Hayes, who had worked for Sarah Palin in 2008. It was Hayes to whom responsibility fell for drafting the Friday CPAC speech.

When Mitt got a look on Thursday morning at what Hayes had put on paper, he wasn’t happy.
It’s too light,
he thought.
I want a serious tone and lots of substance.

After spending two hours with Stevens, Fehrnstrom, Flaherty, Chen, and Hayes debating how to change the speech, Mitt set off for the Virginia suburbs, where he had a fund-raising dinner and another speech to give the next morning before CPAC. He soldiered through the supper, which included taking 450 photos with donors, then went back to his hotel expecting a new draft to be waiting. Nope. Around 11:00 p.m., he convened a conference call with his people for another two hours.
No draft, no time in the morning—and why am I speaking in Virginia?
Romney unhappily thought. Exhausted, he called Ann at around 1:00 a.m., took a sleeping pill, and passed out.